Actual Objects Presents: Voice To Skull

Voice To Skull, the brainchild of artist Theo Karon, is a direct response to being overwhelmed by technology, as well as affecting investigation into what kinds of meaning it is possible to make in collaboration with artificial intelligence. “The film is an emotional response to just how it feels to be alive and consume media right now, when everything is cast out on everything else, all the time,” describes Karon. “You get worked up about something and then it turns out to be debunked, or to have just been more complex than the initial presentation of it that you encountered let on. So you’re stuck. It’s like perpetual jetlag. You’re constantly waking up from a dream and you’re reading about an atrocity and trying to figure out what to order for lunch, both on your phone, at the same time.” Narrated by Chino Amobi, with whom Actual Objects collaborated with on his 2018 film Welcome To Paradiso (City In The Sea), Voice To Skull assumes the perspective of a “data harvester”, a consciousness scouring a hard drive for the last remnants of data, searching for anything resembling information. Citing the work of object-oriented ontologist Timothy Morton, the assemblage of avant-garde artist and experimental filmmaker Joseph Cornell and countless hours spent immersed in online conspiracy theory forums, Karon seeks to render visible the residue left behind when different kinds of media interact within a larger system. Whether it’s the exhaustion and malaise felt when flitting between social media voyeurism and compulsive doom scrolling, the psychic deformities that begin to appear after the quotidien barrage of disinformation found online, or the organic growth of a paranoid logic in the schizophrenic interactions of members of online message boards, Voice To Skull captures all of these feelings. In the words of the film’s narrator, “there is a dim sort of magic to be found here, but first it must be trapped.” This process of entrapment takes the form of a total collaboration with machine learning, in which both the script and elements of the imagery are generated using A.I. For the script, Karon utilized GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), an autoregressive A.I. language model that uses machine learning to produce eerily human-like text. Feeding the model with excerpts of a novel Karon had abandoned writing, as well as numerous conspiracy forum posts, the ensuing dialogue became the basis from which the script for Voice To Skull, itself only the first iteration of a wider Actual Objects project, Disintegration-2, was adapted. “It needs a lot of curation, it would run for a while and then I would do a lot of editing, but in the context of the world that process felt very fitting to me, in that it was this continual layering, adding, subtracting, remixing it back into itself,” they explain. “That’s an important point about the way all of us at Actual Objects want to use A.I.,” notes Rick Farin. “It’s basically Holly Herndon’s whole idea, it’s not about presenting A.I. as it is, it’s about human collaboration with it.” It’s this entanglement of different kinds of intelligence that manifests as a narrative through-line in Voice To Skull, in which the narrator seems preoccupied with distinguishing between artificial and organic consciousness. “YOU APPEAR HUMAN, BUT YOU’RE NOT…” flashes across the screen at one point, while later the narrator describes a process of “regular voice-to-skull communication with the broken artificial intelligences that inhabit this world.” These attempts at categorisation cast doubt on the fundamental qualities of the voice we’re listening to. In this world, is humanity, and by extension the viewer, considered a broken artificial intelligence? Perhaps the title’s reference to bone conduction functions metaphorically and our narrator is only able to make meaning on the inside of the world it seems to be in the process of creating, just as our voices sound other when not heard amidst the vibrations they make across our own skulls. “None of the individual pieces of clips in there have any real significance on their own,” says Rick, “but when they’re all stuck together and then integrated with the audio, some kind of emotional response ends up becoming generated.” Voice To Skull Credits: Concept – Theo Karon & Actual Objects Video – Rick Farin & Claire Farin Script – Artificial Intelligence Audio – Theo Karon Voiceover Narration – Chino Amobi Graphic Design – Collin Fletcher as part of Disintegration-2